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Messages - Philosfr

No, I wasn't as negative as a devouring swarm, but yeah, it was really bad as a hive mind. But it seems like there is always a large alliance coalition, even when I'm not antithetical to other sentient life. It's either join and win, or resist and get swarmed.

I doubt anybody is spending more money at this point, but it looks like the next ship is ready for concept sale. The Vulcan, a solo support ship, able to refuel, rearm and emergency repair other ships. Guess it's going to have some robo-drones to help with the work for a solo pilot. It's an ugly brick of a ship, clearly designed for working rather than aesthetics, and retails around $185

So at some point a few years ago I bought Stellaris and then never played it. Until I saw folks like Valen always playing it and thought I'd give it a whirl

Damn, awesome game. Very well done, one of the best 4x space games since the original Masters of Orion. Highly recommended for anyone who likes that style of game.

But here's my beef. Do you have to play politics? The first game I've won was when I accidentally vassalized myself to a super power. This provided me shelter and some war victories until I grew enough to fight for my independence and turn the tables on my former overlord. My other successful games have been similar... except me heading an alliance of friendly super powers.

When I've tried to be an insectoid menace eating my way across the galaxy, it works very successfully for the first 2/3rds of the game, but at some point every other alien species that's not dominated by crisis factions ends up allying up to kick my bingus. And with the way fleet mechanics work, there's not a lot I can do about it. Is going solo even possible? Is it just playing the game on super hard core mode? I feel like allying up with enough aliens to whoop everyone else is a bit too easy, but going solo seems a bit too hard. I'm looking for the middle ground...

So I've gotten several games in with the new expansion. For the first time, I'm fairly let down by a Civ expansion. This one feels a little gimmicky and a little light.

Golden Age/Dark Ages - Not enough impact on the game, though that's a good thing since they are nearly arbitrary. There are too few things you can control to get you points. And the ones you can, you are either going to do already (such as completing trade routes) or you're not going to change just for the age benefit (making short less profitable trade routes just to get more golden age points vs longer more profitable routes)

Loyalty - Big impact on the game, but also fairly trivial to deal with. I've successfully won cities from enemies with culture, but that was due to their neglect, not much on my part. Using spies to influence it is nearly unnoticeable, and there's not a lot you can do to boost your "culture offensive" to make it more likely. And it doesn't take much to adopt a new policy or move a Governor around to keep your cities in check. The biggest impact is around warfare. You can no longer go to another continent and easy take over a port city to use as a base of operations for expansion. You'll frequently lose the city to disloyalty. But if you took it once, you can take it again, and each time it gives you enough time to capture other nearby cities until you can hang onto them all.

Governors - Interesting idea, very poor execution. The benefits are too specialized and rarely important. Sure, getting the one that boosts trade routes into a central trade city is nice, but most of the time I utilize them for loyalty, which means they are in smaller/newer cities that aren't getting much out of their bonuses. I wish they were a little more "generic" and you could hire more of them with lesser bonuses. It's too micromanaging to move them to cities to build parks and aquaculture with one, then to the next city, etc.

The new units, wonders and cultures are always nice, but they aren't really an expansion to me. Civ expansions have always added entire game mechanics that change it up, but I feel like they fell short on this one. It's not bad, it's not like it makes the game worse, but I don't think it really makes it that much better either.

Anyone else have thoughts? Am I missing something or not giving it a fair shake?

Just FYI, having spent a lot of time in the APAC region where flu masks are super popular... it's not actually for healthy people. It doesn't protect a healthy person. The idea is that a sick person wears them to avoid spreading anything when they go out at public. Research shows it's effective for this, but not effective to protect the person wearing it.